Money can't buy happiness but it can sure make you comfortably miserable, right?
The problem with using money as The primary motivator is that the supply is variable. What happens when you don't have enough? Organizations usually revert to "You are fired if..." negative territory and we all know those work environments.
Money & Things as a life goal seems hollow. My guess is that most people would are working hard to get Money & Things will say, "It's a means to an end." To what end? How much is enough? Show me people who can answer those questions and I will show you people who grok this post.

After we created Stack Overflow, some people were convinced we had built a marginally better mousetrap for asking and answering questions. The inevitable speculation began: can we use your engine to build a Q&A site about {topic}? Our answer was Stack Exchange. Pay us $129 a month (and up), and...